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War Bonnet Original Post: 10 March 2015 I sometimes like to lie back in our recliner, shut my eyes, and listen to the soothing voice of Bob Ross as he paints another of his 30-minute landscapes. All sorts of thoughts come bubbling up out of my subconscious. Recently, an image of a Santa Fe streamliner passenger train, pulled by an F3A diesel engine with the red War Bonnet paint scheme, kept coming to mind. It wasn't on a track in the mountains. It was in space, coming out of some sort of tunnel. A surreal sort of image.
I decided to try to create what was swirling around inside my head with Poser Pro 2014. The image above is the result. One of my first "Zombies Say..." images involved trains. I used a steam locomotive and a Santa Fe F3A diesel engine. The F3A engine had come as part of National7's ATSF Super Chief bundle from Renderosity. So I loaded the F3A diesel engine, an F3B diesel engine, and the three passenger cars into Poser. The train didn't seem long enough to me, so I added a second "Dome Car" and a second "Classic Car" to the train. The default configuration of the train when everything is loaded normally is a straight line. So I rotated each car 3o to give the train a nice bend. Test renders showed the red of the war bonnet to be very dull. I found that the engines and cars had a "reflection map" set for their metallic parts. The map was a picture of some mountains and a very blue sky. Apparently, the blue was interfering with the vivid colors of the train, so I set the reflection color to black, which effectively did away with the blue sky reflection and gave a much more pleasing image. I loaded in DAZ3D's "3 Gate Pass" by Jack Tomalin that I'd used with the "Zombies Say... Rains" image. I used only the Gate Wall, two Side Walls and two Side Gates. I left out the central gates, decreased the size of the Wall set, and placed it so that the train seemed to be coming through the central opening in the wall. I then loaded in one of Poser's HiRes Square primitives and proportioned it to fit a picture of the gibbous moon that I took a while back. I placed the moon beyond the train and wall and enlarged it to provide a background for the image. Unfortunately, no stars appeared in the picture of the moon, so the sky was a boring black. I loaded another HiRes Square primitive and proportioned it for one of my pictures of the Orion constellation. I darkened the image and increased the contrast so that the sky matched the sky in the moon picture. Then I placed the image of Orion in front of and to the left of the moon. I duplicated the Orion picture, rotated it about 45o, and placed it in the lower right of the scene to provide more stars. (Orion was out of the scene, so I didn't end up with two identical star fields.) Lastly, I loaded my Juan del Rio character, resized him to fit the train, and placed him inside the cab of the F3A engine. Now I wonder what will come bubbling up the next time I'm there with Bob Ross and my recliner. Keep reading, keep writing - Jack |
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